I quite agree with Rob Gordon and Damon Feltman’s April 28 Space News article that getting the data management architecture right is paramount for a successful Golden Dome defense, but disagree with key aspects of some of the supporting arguments for its recommendations.
In particular, I doubt the idea that a new program ,anager with an associated expensive bureaucracy is needed to assure success of developing the key space-based components of the Golden Dome, especially if that management is embedded in the existing Air Force/Space Force bureaucracy.
Moreover, as one who is quite familiar with Gen. Bennie Schriever (in particular) and Adm. Hyman Rickover and their innovative management for developing the nation’s ballistic missile-, space- and sea-based strategic capabilities, I also agree that their innovative model is a sound one to follow. But I think Gordon and Feltman omit a key element that made their innovative efforts successful.
I can speak authoritatively about Gen. Schriever’s efforts because I was closely associated with his efforts as an Air Force lieutenant (am proud of an award he gave me over six decades ago) and when he was a close adviser when I was director the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — President Reagan’s initiative that achieved advances that are still not appreciated by most of the technological community, as I have previously elaborated.
Key to Schriever’s success was that he abandoned the then-existing Air Force R&D bureaucracy and exploited then-current events that permitted him to originate an entirely new organization manned my many young Air Force Officers who had obtained advanced engineering and physics degrees, supplemented by TRW’s System Engineering and Technical Direction (SETD) efforts as Gordon and Feltman indicated.
But they should have noted that TRW hired a highly qualified team from all over America (including key engineers from Bell Telephone Labs where I was beginning my technical career).
And they did not mention the similar carefully selected highly qualified Boeing efforts that executed those directions from Schriever’s USAF Team.
Notably, USAF Gen. Sam Phillips managed that effort, and was sent by Gen. Schriever to bail out NASA after their repeated development testing failures. Phillips Laboratory (in Albuquerque) was named after him (later merged into the Air Force Research Laboratory) … and I think Schriever AFB, Colorado is still the only USAF Base named to honor an individual while living.
I am less familiar with Adm. Rickover (though one of my grandsons graduated from “Rickover Tech” and served as a Nuclear Submariner). He, like Schriever, abandoned the usual Navy organizational structure, and (because of his personal extraordinary technical expertise and past successes with nuclear power) he was able to form an elite, personally selected, Navy technically, talented team in a new separate organization — sometimes referred to as Rickover Tech.
His efforts (with major congressional support) enabled him to gain great success in maintaining that expertise and influence … often to the chagrin of the Navy’s leadership.
But my main point is that what Trump’s Golden Dome needs is not a major extension of the current bureaucracy. It is leadership from a skilled, competent leader and a carefully selected team of technically competent individuals.
Moreover, I would argue, as in numerous Newsmax articles, that technology to deploy rapidly a relatively inexpensive space-based interceptor system was demonstrated over three decades ago — and we should be able to do much better with today’s technology.
A former commander of the Air Force Educational and Training Command, who also led the Air University’s “Fast Space” study, collaborated to argue that we need a new culture of innovation in the Air Force and Space Force, we don’t need to build a new bureaucracy or to extend an old one.
We need technically competent leadership, independent of the existing order. That’s what the Schriever/Rickover history teaches.
Spending lots more money simply won’t as rapidly achieve Trump’s goal as empowering the right team and exploiting what is already available in the commercial sector.
Henry F. Cooper, a PhD engineer with a broad defense and national security career, was President Reagan’s Defense and Space Negotiator with the Soviet Union and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Director under President George H.W. Bush. Read Ambassador Cooper’s reports here.
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